The vehicle owners of today rely less on old school word-of-mouth to find their next repair shop, instead, the modern customer’s first impression of your business will likely be through interaction with your branding. Whether this be on the internet or through physical marketing efforts, many potential customers form an immediate idea of your business’ quality-of-work and values when they first come into contact with your brand identity.
As a shop owner, it can be easy to become caught up in the internal operations of your shop. Though a well-oiled shop doesn’t mean much for your bottom line without a brand identity that provides your potential customers the feeling that your shop is right for their wants and needs. Strong branding is one of the primary components of your business that can make a potential customer think “this is the shop for me”.
What Is a Brand Identity?
When many shop owners think of developing a brand, their mind likely goes to the logo and colors that adorn the outside of their business and are featured on their marketing materials.
While it’s true that both colors and logo are an invaluable pillar of your brand, the identity of your brand goes much deeper. Putting a good deal of thought into your colors and logo is important, however, these visual markers of your company need to be accompanied by marketing efforts and an online presence that lines up with how you want your business to be perceived.
A brand identity establishes more than just the visual tone of your business, it extends to every touchpoint the customer has with your shop, including your advertisements, customer communications, the interior of the shop, and every other facet of your business that the customer interacts with.
When you build a brand, you’re not just picking what you want your business to look like, you’re also making a decision on what you want it to feel like. In a world of repair shops fighting for position on Google results pages and clicks on social media ads, a brand that reinforces a set of core values that strikes a chord in your target customer base is a great way to differentiate yourself from the multitude of competitors with bland, uninspired, or missing facets of their brand.
What Makes a Strong Brand Identity?
When vehicle owners are on the lookout for a new repair facility, there are some general questions that they have in mind:
- Does this business have a good reputation among previous customers?
- Does this business communicate clearly?
- Is this business responsive?
- Does this business seem like it meets the needs of me and my vehicle?
That last point is crucial, as the answer for how to leave the proper impression of your shop on your customers depends entirely on the type of business you want to be and the kind of customers you want coming through your doors.
For instance, a European repair facility that targets vehicles with higher repair costs needs a brand that feels as premium as the price you’re charging for service. Compare this to a coupon-focused tire shop, where an overly sleek or even pretentious brand may drive away the exact market of price-conscious customers you’re looking to attract. What constitutes a “good brand” is just as much what your visual elements say about your shop’s values as it is simply looking well-designed.
This differentiation between a good looking brand and a truly strong brand identity is important. You could have colors, a logo, and a font that rival the best in terms of being visually appealing. However, just because a logo looks good does not mean it supports the intended identity around it. That comes with branding that maintains a consistent message about what your shop does well and the type of clientele you’re after.
Why Many Repair Shops Struggle With Brand Identity
There are various cases of shops that check all the right boxes for customers in terms of service quality, pricing, and customer service, yet still fall short of their goals as a result of branding that fails to express the correct identity or even actively drives away potential customers.
It’s no wonder why this happens, as repair shop owners are often focused on keeping the internal operations of their business running like clockwork. With so much to manage inside the shop, it can be difficult to find time or resources to devote towards the branding outside the shop.
For this reason, shop branding often takes a backseat despite its importance. Many shop owners resort to the least time and money consuming route of producing a brand they can find, and while budget branding options can work with the proper foresight and thought put into them, many of these dime-a-dozen brand identities fade into the sea of basic and uninspired repair shop logos.
A common example of a brand falling short of its intended effect is the use of motorsport-related imagery, such as checkered flags, within the branding of general-service shops that don’t focus on performance or tuning. While racing imagery does have an undoubtable “cool factor” to it, the mismatch between the brand being presented and the type of work your shop actually specializes in can cause confusion among new customers interacting with your business.
Even with a solid visual foundation, it’s common to see shops fail to enforce their brand within the shop itself. If the customer doesn’t feel that your shop’s communications match up with the values you convey through your marketing, it may make your brand identity feel inauthentic. Maintaining a strong identity means ensuring that each part of your customers’ service experience is consistent with the values you want to convey.
Steps For Building a Strong Brand Identity
Building a Foundation
While not the entirety of your brand, the colors and visual style that you choose for your business are the foundation of your brand identity for you to build upon.
Whether you’re doing it all yourself or enlisting the help of a designer or brand consultant, starting by deciding on a color palette that you feel fits the intended vibe of your business is vital. There’s no definitive list of what colors work for what business, but keeping the vision of your shop’s intended customer base in mind can help avoid choosing colors that feel out of place within your brand and online presence.
For example, any clashing color palette will immediately make your brand feel that much less put-together. Bright colors can work well in a variety of situations, but using them in the right amounts and with complimentary colors is a crucial part of making the brand feel established rather than garish and thrown together. Neutral palettes do a great job of providing a sleek and professional feel, but the absence of any vibrant color within your brand can both make your business feel bland and sterile as well as making it difficult to draw attention to call-to-actions on your marketing materials or website.
Beyond colors, building a visual identity for your brand includes choosing a logo, fonts, imagery, and a general visual style that align with how you want potential customers to feel upon interacting with your brand. A website or marketing material that appears out of place among the rest of your branding will make the identity of your shop feel mismatched and incomplete.
Establish Your Brand Voice
Now that you have a visual baseline for your brand to build upon, it’s important to establish a voice for your brand. Your shop’s “voice” is the tone, attitude, and values you convey through all of your customer communications. From the initial phone call, to the appointment itself, to the follow-up texts and emails you send, maintaining a consistent voice every time you interact with a customer is vital to reinforcing their trust in your business.
Do you want your shop to feel professional and premium? Local and accessible? Friendly and personal? Every time you write promotional material copy, website pages, review responses, or otherwise, the tone you convey in your writing reflects directly on the values of your shop.
Bring It All Together
With the visual foundation you’ve built and your intended brand voice in mind, now it’s all about ensuring consistency across every facet of your shop. Whether it’s you writing your marketing copy, an employee, or a separate marketing agency, it’s crucial to make sure that the pillars of your brand identity are reflected in both the visual design of the advertisement, the content that accompanies it, and the in-store experience of the customers that it brings in.
If all done correctly, the customer’s experience of interacting with your shop and its employees should reflect the foundations of your brand from start to finish.
Conclusion
A good brand isn’t built overnight, instead it requires your shop to incorporate those core brand values into your everyday operations and gradually build a sense of connectivity and consistency among the various parts of your business.
If you feel your shop is falling short of that all-important first impression, or your brand just doesn’t quite match the values you want your shop to portray, this doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch. Slight tweaks to both the visual identity and customer-facing voice of your company can help you make great strides in building the kind of awareness and tone around your brand that you want.
Whether you’re hiring a brand consultant or designer, or simply making these decisions yourself, ensuring that the core pillars of your brand are integrated into your long-term marketing strategy is vital.
HiBeam CRM’s Campaign Builder provides you with the tools you need to efficiently create effective text and email campaigns that blend seamlessly with your branding long-term, so you can spend more time focusing on the parts of shop ownership that matter to you and less time fiddling with email blasts. Our Reputation Management feature allows you to keep all of your review responses in one place, making it easy to ensure your shop is presenting the proper tone and voice to customers. Build trust, increase customer loyalty, and reach more of your target audience with all-in-one marketing management from HiBeam. Book a demo with our team today to see how HiBeam can improve your shop’s branding efforts and consistency.
